


asphodel

by fensandmarshes



Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF)
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Dead TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Dead Wilbur Soot, Dream SMP Spoilers, Gen, Older Sibling Wilbur Soot, Protective Wilbur Soot, Scared TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF), Villain Wilbur Soot, Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit are Siblings of Choice, Wilbur Soot Angst, c!wilbur my beloved. you're so awful and i like you so much, god i hate that tag but it's what he'd want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-09
Updated: 2021-03-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:28:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29932743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fensandmarshes/pseuds/fensandmarshes
Summary: “I could kill Dream first,” Wilbur muses. His words are the scratch of a quill-pen on old parchment, the sound of an artist plotting his symphony. “But you know what, Tommy?”All he can feel of himself is the shaking. The rest of him has dissolved into this void. “What,” he rasps, ash thick on his tongue.“He’d hurt the rest of them so much more if he went free,” Wilbur says, his grin yawning wider than his face. “Aw, you’re shaky breathing again. What did I say?”Tommy spends months with his brother in the afterlife. This is why he doesn't want him back.
Relationships: No Romantic Relationship(s), Wilbur Soot & TommyInnit
Comments: 62
Kudos: 299





	asphodel

**Author's Note:**

> \- this is my attempt to reconcile the discrepancies between the void scene with tommy and wilbur and the way tommy acts in the scene following!! personally i really like the theory that tommy and wilbur have a Plan, but this is not about that.  
> \- i tried so fucking hard to make this canon compliant and then realised that it had like 30 errors anyway. if you see them: no you don't ♥  
> \- content warnings for uh. vilbur, parallels being drawn between c!wilbur and c!dream and the way the two of them interact with c!tommy, the inherent major character death warning that comes with fics about the afterlife, panic attacks being ignored/spoken over, brief depictions of blood/injury, repeated discussion of the way tommy died (being beaten to death), brief mention of torture (honestly wanted to get into this more but ran out of space for it in the pacing lmao) and a general fucked-up dynamic between wilbur and tommy (all platonic though) which constantly juxtaposes how much they love each other with how bad they are for each other, and especially how bad wilbur is for tommy.  
> \- i put this on all my dsmp fics but i CANNOT stress it enough for this one: **this is entirely about the dsmp characters, not the irl ccs.**  
>  \- thank you to ao3 user supinetothestars for the beta!!!  
> \- uh. e-enjoy. can't wait until canon shatters this into the dust!

At first, in the darkness, Wilbur’s promises are reassuring.

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” he says, in what Tommy knows is the second day, because Wilbur’s a little nutty about counting them like that - tally marks line the bared skin of Wilbur’s forearms, in ink that matches the L’Manberg constitution, the sleeves of his coat pushed back to make room for cramped handwriting that sprawls over every free inch of space. It’s so dark - how Wilbur can read any of it is a mystery. “Don’t misunderstand me, Tommy - I _don’t_ want to go back. But if that green motherfucker so much as tries to drag me into helping him, I’m going to put my fist straight through that fucking mask and I’m gonna -”

“Wilbur,” Tommy interrupts, and he doesn’t quite know why his heart is pounding. Not like it fucking needs to, after all. Not in this black voidspace, where all he has is the faintest outline of a half-mad brother in the darkness.

Wilbur cocks his head to the side, almost absent-mindedly. “Your breathing’s gone all funny again,” he observes, and Tommy knows that, thanks, doesn’t fucking like having it pointed out, and he bares his teeth right back, opens his mouth to spit something -

“For what Dream did to my little brother,” Wilbur says, eyes bright with passion in the dark, “death would be too kind.”

The darkness doesn’t end.

Some time later - it might be days or minutes - Wilbur says, voice lilting, hands dancing in that way he’s always had, “It’s probably better for them that both of us are here, you know.”

“Shut up,” says Tommy, “shut up.” It’s only been a day, by Wilbur’s fervent count, and each minute the warmth of Wilbur’s presence in his chest rots a little more - it shouldn’t, it _shouldn’t,_ Wilbur is Tommy’s friend and that’s what matters and Wilbur is all Tommy fucking has at the moment. Wilbur and his tapping and his pacing and the cramped handwriting on his arms and the ink that smells like Tubbo’s office in the White House and his talking and talking and talking and his competitive fucking solitaire - it’s too much and also it’s not enough, in the void below the world and the way that Tommy’s chest still aches like it’s being beaten in this very moment. 

“I’m just saying, bro,” Wilbur says, looking over. He is the barest hint of a figure in the darkness and yet, somehow, Tommy can make him out clearly - not with his eyes but with the part of him that feels phantom pain, like blows raining down on his face. “If I get dragged back there, they brought what happens upon themselves, you know?”

“Will, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tommy says, because it’s better than the alternative. He scrabbles amongst the rows of cards, the motion sending pain spiking through his chest, and picks one at random. “Jack of spades, eh? What’s this one mean?”

“It means you’re ruining the fucking - I spent _hours_ setting those up,” Wilbur seethes, a blur of motion in the dark. His coat flutters out behind him. It smells like the ink from L’Manberg and the weird fucking incense Wilbur was always burning as president, and the acrid blaze powder in the Camarvan, and it smells like ash and soot and gunpowder. Wilbur falls to his knees beside Tommy, and his coat carries the weight of his selves.

Tommy curls his own knees up to his chest. Everything is too much and not enough, and pain splinters across his body like it’s someone else who thinks he wants to be punished.

Wilbur makes promises like they’re lullabies. He soothes Tommy’s shoulders with what little corporeal touch they’re able to muster, and he folds the smell of ash and ink around Tommy like a blanket, and he whispers to Tommy in the darkness as Tommy curls in on himself, snotty-faced, crying.

“We like it here,” Wilbur murmurs, “in the quiet, with only each other, right?” And Mexican Dream and Schlatt, but they mostly ignore those two. “It’s so good to have you here, Tommy. But we both know it’s not forever.”

Tommy can feel himself shaking. Wilbur looms behind him, a shadowy figure and yet somehow solid; there is no dancing gloomy lava-light here to block, no half-silhouettes cast on the obsidian, only a silence that is utterly complete. Wilbur’s words are anomalies, in this void. He clings to them.

“They’re gonna call us back,” Wilbur hushes him, “and when they do, they’re gonna regret it.”

He talks about _them_ like they’re one entity. Tommy thinks, half-delirious in an effort to escape the horrible constant clarity that comes with being dead, that Wilbur would suit that gloomy box - that his coat would gather the sludgy starlight from the obsidian like it was made to bear imprisonment. Like Wilbur was never a creature meant to be free.

“I could kill Dream first,” Wilbur muses. His words are the scratch of a quill-pen on old parchment, the sound of an artist plotting his symphony. “But you know what, Tommy?”

All he can feel of himself is the shaking. The rest of him has dissolved into this void. “What,” he rasps, ash thick on his tongue.

“He’d hurt the rest of them so much more if he went free,” Wilbur says, his grin yawning wider than his face. “Aw, you’re shaky breathing again. What did I say?”

Tommy loves his brother. Tommy loves his brother, really, because what else can he do?

“Shut up,” he demands, “stop it, _stop it_ -”

“They hurt you, Tommy! Why can’t you see that,” Wilbur spits, and he’s pacing again, and the sound of his footsteps against nothing is both silent and a cacophony of screaming in the ears Tommy left behind him, attached to his corpse in a cell. “It’s the two of us, yeah - I said we wouldn’t always have each other, but I fucking lied, because it _always_ comes down to the two of us.” He pauses. Wheels around to face Tommy, his stare jabbering accusations, declarations of guilt scrawled across his irises in the ink they wrote the Constitution with. “Everything that ever went to shit on that world, that’s on us, Tommy. _That’s_ what we’ve done. That’s who we are.”

“No, no, shut the fuck up,” Tommy interrupts, anger bubbling in him, like poison rising in his lungs - it stings, it stings, but he’s used to hurting. “I’m not like you -”

“You’re _just_ like me, Tommy,” Wilbur hisses. Quiet. Loving. “We’ve always been the bad guys.”

Tommy gives a wordless scream. The universe swallows it whole.

“... Toms?” Wilbur says, after a moment, like he didn’t even hear.

Tommy doesn’t want to know the rules of fucking solitaire. He doesn’t want to help build an arena that he can’t even see. (Wilbur insists that your eyes adjust to the darkness, after long enough. But it’s been almost a week already, and Wilbur’s only been here six months, right? How fucking long can it take?)

Tommy doesn’t want to know the rules of solitaire - but every minute Tommy spends playing with cards, every six of hearts he slams down like a fuck you to the infinite empty of the future, that’s another minute Wilbur doesn’t spend talking about what he’s going to do when Drea - when they’re brought back. That’s another minute Wilbur doesn’t spend trying to convince Tommy of the server’s guilt. Of their own horrid, twisted righteousness. Tommy fumbles his way through solitaire, and he gets used to the way that every sound shattering the void-quiet is processed as another punch into the viscera of his gut, scattering bits of him across the room, and he grits his teeth and sticks a five of clubs on top of the _fucking_ six.

“No, no, Tommy, moving this king over here would have been a better idea,” Wilbur says. Tommy doesn’t think about how he can see Wilbur’s fingers in the darkness, stained black with so much soot and yet visible against the blackness. They reach past him, long, spidery, musician’s hands; there’s callouses on his fingers that Tommy remembers from lamplit evenings, months ago, years ago. 

“Don’t tell me what to do,” he snaps, “I’ll move the fucking - the five if I wanna, bitch,” and for a moment he dares to think that this could be healing. That this is getting better. He remembers arguing with Will over card games, back in the warm - Tommy doesn’t like lava but he likes fire when it’s tamed by a hearth -

“Last time you did what you thought was the best idea possible it got you exiled,” Wilbur chuckles, and pats him on the back with a broad hand, brotherly. “Well. There have probably been more recent examples -”

“Can’t hear you,” Tommy insists, “can’t _fucking_ hear you,” and he starts trumpeting the Able Sisters at the top of his punctured lungs. He reaches for another card.

“It was - Tubbo was the one to make that call, wasn’t he?” Wilbur muses. “Shame about him. I - I like the kid, Tommy, but he should’ve known better than to betray you.”

Tommy’s hands are shaking, suddenly; he fucks up the whole column, and it scatters across the nothingness.

“Look what you’ve done,” Wilbur scolds. “Tubbo’s second on the list, alright? We’ll let Dream out first, when we get back, but after that I’m heading straight to Snowchester.”

Bile rises in Tommy’s throat. His stomach’s a prison-box, and it’s roiling with sludgy burning.

“I’ll slit his throat for what he did to you,” Wilbur promises. There’s a smile in his voice.

There’s no night in the void. Wilbur keeps the hours religiously, and insists Tommy sleep when his count marks ten in the evening, and proceeds to spend the next nine hours variously pacing, muttering and whispering in Tommy’s ear as Tommy curls deeper into himself and covers his ears.

It’s the nights, which are no more than some box Wilbur has imprisoned the both of them in, when he makes the worst of his promises. He rattles off names like a curse-worker.

(“Techno never gave a damn about either of us,” Wilbur hums, crouched by Tommy’s shoulder like an overlarge spider. The smell of smoke curls bitter between them, leaving them intertwined. “You could kill him if you wanted, Tommy, I think that would be fair. Bring an axe straight down on that turtle helmet.”

Tommy’s limbs are usually the least in pain of the body he doesn’t have - he’s getting used to its ins and outs, after two whole weeks of this, enough time for the moon to go from full to completely eaten - but tonight, today, they’re heavy. Phantom weight presses his wrists to the obsidian he can’t see or feel or touch but knows must be there, has to be there - An anvil sits on his lungs. There is a hand over his mouth - he can’t even scream _Stop it, stop it_ -

“How would you do it, Tommy?” Wilbur whispers. “Would you use the axe you stole from him? I’m so fucking proud of you, I really am.”)

There’s no night in the void, but there are times when Wilbur will play Go Fish or Uno or his favourite dumb fucking game that Tommy hates with everything he has but succumbs to because how the fuck else is he going to while away eternity in this emptiness? There’s no night in the void, but there are times when Wilbur sings Tommy to sleep; Tommy wouldn’t be caught dead saying it but he’s always liked Wilbur’s voice, and it fills the darkness with simmering fury that’s the only peace Tommy has left. There’s no night in the afterlife, but there are times when Wilbur talks and talks and talks -

(“Ranboo’s a bit of a dick, inne,” Wilbur says, like thinking out loud. “Letting you take all the blame like that.”

“Ranboo’s my friend,” Tommy snaps, and doesn’t let himself wonder if he’s lying. That way lies madness -

“Friendship doesn’t mean anything, these days,” Wilbur says dismissively. “We’re brothers, though. God, Tommy, you know I like it here, but sometimes I almost wish Dream would hurry up with that fucking book.”

 _Doesn’t this place hurt you too,_ Tommy wants to say, _doesn’t your body remember its own deaths, don’t your senses live the same pain over and over?_

What he says, fierce and biting, is this: “You’re a dick.”

“Never heard that one before,” Wilbur says airily. “Go back to sleep, Tommy. Big day in the solitaire tournament tomorrow.”)

The names pile up like stacks of cards, and Wilbur sorts them into order, says _first this, then this,_ like a jack of spades on a diamond queen. He likes listing the sins, a judge reading the accusations; he likes murmuring to himself, humming it under his breath, quoting it to the darkness, what he’s going to do to them for it. Tommy, his unwilling jury; this role is bad enough without Wilbur imploring him constantly to join him as executioner.

He numbers the people who hurt Tommy. He details his revenge. Tommy, who is long used to being hurt, can do nothing but listen; losing Wilbur’s voice again would, he thinks, be worse.

If this were the real world, the moon would have swelled and shrunk an entire circle by now; Tommy misses the sky, missed it in that box even before he had it shattered out of him with the rest of his teeth and his blood and his breath. A couple of his ribs, too. It’s been a month, and Wilbur talks like he’s running out of time, sketches plans in the unwilling canvas of the silence, fills all the space on his arms with ink and clears them only for the words to come creeping back over them like so many cramped black spiders. Tommy shouts his voice raw and he breaks his knuckles on the flat surface of the empty dark, leaves them bloody with nothing, and Wilbur takes his hands and clucks over them like he did in the days before Pogtopia.

“Save your strength,” he advises Tommy.

“Don’t you _fucking_ start.”

“I’m just saying - I’m just saying, there’s not long to go, is all!”

Tommy pauses in his fidgeting, his hands stilling, the motion of his body swallowed again by the universe; it’s like the moment he knows thrice over, the pause before the distant boom that you think is thunder before the rock under your feet is going up in lightning. “What the fuck are you talking about, man,” he demands. Into the silence that yawns too wide: “Wil _bur_ -”

“Oh, I worked it out,” Wilbur says, and there’s a rustling like he’s fumbling with paper; it’s too dark for Tommy to make him out, and when he steps forwards, squinting, a punch comes out of the void and hits him square in the ribcage. He doubles over, coughing, and takes the pain cause he’s got nothing better to do; a little way away, Wilbur exclaims, sounding gleeful, “Got it!”

“Got what,” Tommy wheezes, around the agony that is his soul reliving his body over and over again.

“I spent so long _calculating_ ,” Wilbur says, with the fervour in his voice that he got when talking about L’Manberg, about taking it back, about blowing it all back, about having a drug business because that would be so brilliant, Tommy, really, we could even make a _van._ “There’s spaces growing and shrinking all the time and it’s like the code of the world’s here, if you just know how to look - You wouldn’t understand it, anyway, could never really pass maths in primary school, could you?”

“Oh, fuck you,” Tommy says, his bones rearranging themselves, “not like you’re any better -”

“Do you or do you not want to know how long is left for us in here,” Wilbur says, almost bored.

It hits Tommy then, like another punch in his throat. _Wilbur can’t come back,_ he thinks, fierce and desperate, and it’s a betrayal all over again - but Wilbur’s words are crawling over his brain like spiders, and he thinks of his brother’s voice meandering over the names, too many to count, _Sam, Techno, Quackity, Fundy,_ thinks of Wilbur insisting _I’ll make it right for you, Tommy - blow them all away, could use TNT, now there’s a thought_ \- thinks of Wilbur’s eyes too bright in the darkness and his grin too big for his face and the way his fingers are covered in soot and ash and gunpowder, always gunpowder, his favourite plaything.

Wilbur’s words echo around him like his brain’s conjuring them from nothing, and Wilbur stands, impassive, a few metres away, and he crumples to his knees, feels breath fighting itself in his ribcage, feels the darkness on his skin, hears _use his axe, bit of a cunt, slit his throat, I’m so proud of you, Tommy._ Hears Wilbur singing him to sleep, hears his promises. A cough splutters its way out of a throat that isn’t his own because he’s so far out of his body but also so much in it and it _hurts,_ blows raining down on him and he feels himself shattering - He knows the cadence of Wilbur’s voice over certain lines like they’ve been seared into his brain by a quill dipped in lava. Has had these nightmares for far longer than a month. 

_Let’s be the bad guys,_ clamours Wilbur’s imagined voice, and Tommy thinks _no -_

There’s a hand, warm and solid, on his back, and he presses further into the contact like it’s the only grounded thing in this void. Maybe it fucking is, he doesn’t know. The smell of ink and blaze powder and soot is as familiar as home, and an amalgamation of everyone who’s ever hurt Tommy, who Wilbur wants to hurt in return, and -

And Wilbur whispers, “Hey, Toms, you’re doing the breathing - just in and out slow with me, okay?”

And Tommy breathes, like he can’t do anything else. And his brother breathes with him. And he thinks, _You can never be alive again._

(And that includes Tommy, doesn’t it. Because it’s a _let’s_ be the bad guys, and a _we’re_ what’s wrong with the server, and everything Wilbur wants to do is for Tommy’s sake anyway -)

So Wilbur can never be alive again, and Tommy can never be alive again, and Wilbur insists he knows just how long it will be until Dream draws one of them back like a rabbit out of a hat, that he can see into the code that is the universe and spy on the slow workings of Dream’s ritual. Tommy’s pretty sure that if Dream could do it, he would’ve done it by now, but Wilbur only gives him a weird look and says “No, that’s not how it works” when Tommy voices this out loud, so Tommy’s just refusing to think about it and hoping for the best.

They play more competitive solitaire. Wilbur can finish his deck faster, every time; his mind is a twisty ragged thing, but fuck, is it fast. Mexican Dream comes and goes, giving Tommy a multitude of panic attacks that Wilbur variously snickers about or soothes him through, depending on how he feels that day; keeping track of the days is one of the only things there is to do, in here, the void under the world that is death, that is a kind of torture second only to solitary confinement.

Wilbur says, placing down a flurry of cards that Tommy can make out in the darkness without having to squint, “Do you think Sam would explode if you had a flint and steel?”

“Fuck off,” Tommy says out of habit, gritting his teeth and trying to force his own cards to cooperate. He’s so sick of this game. Of all of Wilbur’s games, really. “Sam’s - Sam’s just keeping Dream locked up, he’s doing his best.”

“He’s a good - ehhh, I’d estimate, uh, thirty per cent? Thirty per cent of the reason you died.”

“Well you have ‘im to fucking thank for that, then,” Tommy mutters.

Wilbur pauses. Pain flickers in, like a faulty lightbulb, in the back of Tommy’s skull. “I s’pose I do,” Wilbur says; his hands have stilled.

Anger rises in Tommy’s chest at the silence that follows; he knows perfectly well where Wilbur wants to go with this, can tell from the way Wilbur’s fingers have let the card he was holding slip back to the rest and Wilbur’s lip is curled in the faintest smirk-sneer-snarl and Wilbur’s whole body is poised to search through the papers stowed in that stupid fucking coat at the slightest hint that Tommy might want him to. “Go on then,” he demands, and it comes out like he’s sneering himself (just like Wilbur, the time’s getting to him) - “I know you fucking want to. Just tell me how long it is before the silence kills me, man.”

“Awww,” Wilbur says, lip curling wider; his teeth are bared when he grins. “Aww, Tommy, you do care!”

“Shut the fuck up -”

“- What are you gonna do, call me _Wilby_ again -”

“I never fucking - I hate you,” Tommy spits, rage bright and burning, sat there in front of the deck of cards, pathetic, “I hate you so fucking much -”

“- Fine! I can tell you, if you’re that interested - Really, Tommy, that’s so sweet of you to ask -”

“I don’t give a _shit_ -”

“Enough time left to build the arena, I reckon,” Wilbur says, his words carrying impossibly in the silence all around them. “We can finish that before we go. Not long after that.”

Tommy stands, the movement punching the air out of him; he keeps his chin high all the same. “Fuck _you_ ,” he grumbles, drawn-out and exhausted, and makes sure to muddle his feet through his own solitaire game as he storms away.

There’s only so far in this void he can go. 

Tommy walks and walks, and everywhere the smell of ash and ink and incense wreathes around him; the darkness is infinite and yet he knows Wilbur would only be a few steps away if he turned around and chose to walk back, to shove his hands in his pockets, to say “Hey, dickhead” and suggest they switch games for a while. Go Fish is the most tolerable. He doesn’t know how much time has passed, doesn’t have an internal clock bound to his heartbeat the way Wilbur keeps one in his stab-marred chest; he doesn’t expect this to be so fucking terrifying, but.

He keeps walking, and there’s something panicky rising in his chest as he realises he doesn’t know whether it’s been a month and sixteen days or a month and seventeen.

He can’t have been gone for long and yet somehow he misses Wilbur, Wilbur and his promises, Wilbur and saying he’s going to kill everyone Tommy’s ever loved because everyone Tommy’s ever loved has hurt him. Wilbur and that possessive protectiveness that Tommy has fucking missed being caught under the shield of for six long months between Wilbur’s death and his own. Somehow Tommy misses the coat, billowing about Wilbur like wings. He misses its touch on his skin. He misses touch, period. 

The void is infinitely more terrifying when Tommy faces it alone. He bites his lip, feels panic spiralling in him, and turns and runs ten steps the way he came before he’s colliding into Wilbur’s chest and stumbling backwards onto the ground.

The breath is punched out of him. He can’t see Wilbur, like his eyes have gotten used to the all-consuming dark again. “Hello?” he says, forcing the fright down his throat, and then, a joke that falls flat, “Am I dead?”

Wilbur lets the silence hang too long, like a kind of punishment, before he concedes, “Hello, Tommy.”

The relief is heady when it goes to Tommy’s head and it floods out of him with the sigh. “Hey,” he says, and stumbles when he tries to get up; his balance is evading him, the void spinning every which way. He coughs.

“How’s it going, man? You alright?” Wilbur says, and his smile is creeping into his voice but Tommy can’t even see it -

“Yeah,” he spits, “I’m better than ever,” and he doesn’t know if he wants to shudder in Wilbur’s grasp, come home to the smell of smoke, or curl into a ball of pain and panic and all the fury Wilbur’s built in him since the very beginning.

Wilbur only repeats his words, maddening, before offering, “Could say you’re straight vibing -”

“Fuck off,” Tommy says, too tired to put bite into it, “fuck off -” 

They argue over Wilbur’s stupid fucking timekeeping. They argue over competitive solitaire. Soon enough, the bickering turns barbed the way Wilbur’s words always do. “Stop saying that to me,” Tommy says, “ _stop_ it,” and Wilbur ignores him, like he always does, and _keeps talking_ -

“Me and you were never good for that server,” Wilbur points out, and he’s pacing. Tommy can hear him pacing, and his breath comes fast, thunderous, and Wilbur’s circling him like a shark again, like a scuttling spider, with his eyes gleaming, just barely, in the dark. He sounds gleeful. “We just weren’t! Like - like you can look at the whole history of the server, and it all falls on our laps, the problems - You’re doing that thing.” He sounds fond. “That thing, where you do the shaky breath again -”

“Thanks for pointing it out,” Tommy mumbles. It comes out small. Wilbur’s words echo around him in flurries of cramped handwriting, overwhelming, and he can’t make anything out but Wilbur just keeps _talking_ and he tries, desperate, to make Wilbur understand - “When you talk like this, I do the thing where my voice gets shaky. When you _talk_ like this -”

“- Yeah, yeah. Here’s the thing -” Wilbur barrels on, doesn’t give a shit - “If it weren’t for me and you dying, right, the server would be in shambles,” he says, and Tommy thinks, _All you talk about is what you’re going to do to it, when you go back._ Wilbur has always embraced his own destiny even as he fought it with his everything - a man who imprisoned himself in a ravine and a button room and still tried to talk about freedom. A man emancipated, trapped in a void with no boundaries. “I know for a _fact_ that - if I come back, or if I’m brought back to life, it’s just going to go to shit again -”

“Fuck _off,_ ” Tommy seethes, “you are fucking _here,_ and I am so -”

“I know what I’m like,” Wilbur says. The universe takes his words and magnifies them, their quiet, the way they are everything and nothing; Tommy thinks _No you fucking don’t, you have no idea_ \- He can’t breathe, tries to say something, but Wilbur continues, his words blossoming from him like so many poisonous flowers, “That’s the issue.”

“Well I know what I’m like,” Tommy snaps, “and I fucking hate it here! -”

Wilbur’s laugh is too giddy and too gleeful and too much, and he responds, his smile brother-wide, “I’m having a great time.” Tommy can see him again, in the dark. Can see the bloodstains on his coat and the ash and soot on his fingers, wonders if it should be reversed - blood on Wilbur’s hands, soot for his heart. That’d be fucking hilarious. Wilbur’s voice gathers and gathers and gathers, a storm of its very own, and Tommy zones him out. Mumbles something bitter about Mexican Dream. He doesn’t even notice the quiet until it’s too late.

The universe is _swallowing him whole -_

“Tommy,” comes a voice that slams him back into his body, and the world goes so, so bright.

  
  
  


“Dream, listen to me,” Tommy says, the world ragged around him, his breath coming in heaving clutches of obsidian air. His skin feels heavy and everything is too loud and this is more important than anything he has ever done in his three old lives or this new fourth chance that pulled him from hell without so much as a phoenix’s fiery fanfare - “The things I saw, the things he talked about, the things he said he - the things he _will_ do -”

(Tubbo is the one who sticks in his mind: Wilbur detailing which limbs he would take, which nerves he would expose, before the others. All for Tommy, Wilbur said. All for him -)

“Never,” Tommy spits, “ _ever,_ ” and he’s shaking, incoherent, “bring Wilbur back.”

The world is acid against his skin and pins driven into his ears, and still he manages to say it. He looks Dream straight in that fucking mask, and he ignores the way he aches for someone to speak quietly to him, ignores the way he can feel the absence of the smoke-smell like something living and pressed against his skull. He says, voice shaking, “Please.”

Dream doesn’t listen.

Tommy doesn’t sleep in the prison and he didn’t sleep in the void. He hears Dream talking and talking and talking, and he curls into himself, folds up his limbs and pain and splintering, and he knows this: When Wilbur comes back, he will kill everybody Tommy has loved and he will make it hurt.

And all of it in Tommy’s name.

**Author's Note:**

> the fields of asphodel are where people who are neither good nor bad go. no matter who you are, what you've done, if you weren't good or bad enough, you go to asphodel.
> 
> c!wilbur's done so many things wrong and i love him so fucking much. leave me comments. do not ask me to write more in the comments.


End file.
